BOOTLEG FILES 829: “Vom Bäumlein, Das Andere Blätter Hat Gewollt” (1940 animated short made in Nazi Germany).
LAST SEEN: On the Internet Archive and on YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: No sane U.S. label is going to put it into home entertainment release.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Nein.
The filmmakers of Nazi Germany were pathetically jealous of their counterparts in Hollywood. After all, the German cinema suffered a creative brain drain after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, with the greatest talents leaving for other countries while significantly inferior pro-Nazi talents remained behind.
The absence of creative talent during the Nazi-era cinema is painfully on display with a seven-minute animated film from 1940 called “Vom Bäumlein, Das Andere Blätter Hat Gewollt.” That roughly translates into “From the Little Tree That Wanted Other Leaves,” and it was inspired by a well-known poem by Friedrich Rückert, a 19th century poet whose work was revered in his native land.
Rückert’s poem concerns a little pine-needle tree in the middle of a forest. The tree is upset because it is the only one in its area that has needles instead of leaves – and due to the sting of its needles, it has never experienced the sensation of being touched.
One day, the tree makes a wish for its needles to be turned into leaves made of pure gold. Overnight, the tree is miraculous transformed and its branches are rich with gold leaves that are so shiny that a bird can see its own reflection in a leaf. But in the evening, an intruder in the forest spots the golden tree and plucks away all but one of its leaves, stuffing the bounty into a large bag while abandoning the denuded tree to the night air.
At this point, unfortunately, filmmaker Heinz Tischmeyer detours away from Rückert’s poetry. Whereas Rückert’s poem stated “A farmer walked through the woods / With a big sack and a long beard,” Tischmeyer remembered who was salting his schnitzel and changed the farmer into a caricature of a Jewish man. This anti-Semitic caricature earns the wrath of a blackbird that squawks angrily, but that does not stop the Jewish man from robbing the tree of its golden foliage.
The unhappy tree then wishes to have leaves made of glass – why glass, of all things, is unclear. But, once again, the tree wakes up in the morning and its branches are bedecked with glass leaves. Alas, Mother Nature is working against the tree and a storm blows up, with fierce winds that break all of the glass leaves.
The tree then wishes to have green leaves like the other trees. Once again, morning brings a new look for the tree – along with a she-goat with full udders that promptly eats all the newly arrived green leaves.
You might think that the tree would wish for a lumberjack to put it out its misery, but instead it wishes to be put back to its original state with needles instead of leaves. That wish is also granted, and the tree laughs merrily and its return to normalcy while the other trees in the forest – who were silent all through this weird story – suddenly start laughing at the tree. And all the forest creatures join in the laughing. Whether German audiences were also laughing back in 1940 is unknown – certainly, no one else in Europe found the Germans very funny at that point in time.
The animators borrowed a page from the Disney cartoons by making “Vom Bäumlein, Das Andere Blätter Hat Gewollt” in color – using their own second-rate Agfacolor process since they could not access the boldly hued three-strip Technicolor. The entire film has off-screen narration, with one voice actress reciting most of the poem and another doing the dialogue for the tree. We never see the tree talking, which is peculiar since the other trees in the forest have faces while this ridiculous little tree doesn’t.
As for the animation, “Vom Bäumlein, Das Andere Blätter Hat Gewollt” is so crudely made that you have to wonder why they even bothered. The artwork is flat and dreary, and the animators have no clue how to spatially integrate their characters into a setting. For something that was supposedly the work of filmmaking professionals, the short is among the most amateurish animated films ever made. And had it not included that miserable anti-Semitic caricature, it is unlikely that anyone would want to see it.
“Vom Bäumlein, Das Andere Blätter Hat Gewollt” did not get a U.S. release in 1940 and was unknown on this side of the Atlantic until many years after it was made – after World War II was over, the Allied occupation forces in Germany seized the country’s Nazi-era films. Films with anti-Semitic themes were kept out of view and remained unavailable for many years. An unauthorized posting has been on the Internet Archive site since 2014 and another unauthorized posting turned up on YouTube a year ago – but unless you have a curiosity about the cinema of Nazi Germany, there is no reason to waste seven minutes on this awful short.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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